Jonas the snow storm

25Jan

Warning: picture heavy post. Enjoy!

Yep, we got pummeled by Jonas Friday night and all day Saturday.

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It was nice for a while on Saturday because I had no responsibilities. Mom was safely ensconced in her house with my dad and brother. Hub was here with me. We watched three episodes of House of Cards on Saturday. We’d been wanting to check it out but just hadn’t found the time. We sat around and did nothing while the storm blew and spewed and accumulated. Every couple of hours Hub would go out and shovel a path off the deck and into the yard for the dogs. I tried to go out to help broom off the stairs and like a dumb-butt, I put my foot down where I thought it was ground only it wasn’t ground yet, I twisted my knee, fell sideways and barely caught myself from slamming into the stair post and the house and the ground. My knee was sore and my back was tweaked. Needless to say Hub shuffled me back into the house right away and settled me on the recliner with an ice pack on my knee.

For most of Saturday the dogs did pretty well. They would run off the deck, pee in one of the paths Hub had shoveled, then run back into the house. Butthead even found a spot to poop in all that snow, but Le Moo held out until Sunday morning.

We enjoyed the day of nothing Saturday, without really thinking about much about the front of the house. Friday afternoon before the snow started, we parked my four wheel drive SUV parallel to the garage door, thinking if we got it close enough to the door, it and the roof overhang would protect the garage door from the snow. And also, the truck would be out of the way of the plow guy that comes to take care of our long driveways.

The best laid plans of mice and men.

This morning when I came downstairs, Hub told me that Le Moo pooped after a long, drawn out wander through the 28″ of snow we got. She refused to poop in any of the paths Hub had shoveled, instead she “swam” over the snow to try and get to the back of the yard to poop. At some point she gave up and pooped somewhere, which Hub then shoveled out of the way. Butthead, on the other hand, didn’t poop at her normal time first thing in the morning. So I took her out when I came downstairs and watched as she frantically ran along all the paths–back and forth, back and forth–sometimes jumping up onto the walls of snow around her. She FINALLY climbed up into unshoveled snow, pooped, then couldn’t figure out how to get back to the house without jumping OVER the poop. And not making a clean jump…literally. I had to clean her fur when we got back to the house. YUCK.

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After that, I went to the garage to see how well our ultra-smart SUV/garage setup went. I opened the access door we have in the garage (a standard size door that leads out to the driveway right next to the garage so we don’t always have to open the garage door to get in and out)…and found this.

and this…

and this…

and this…

That last picture? Can you see the very top edge of my SUV there? And on the right side, my garage door? With the snow piled up in between? Pressing against my garage door so hard it was bowed in on the inside?

Yeah. So pretty much we were actually STUCK IN THE HOUSE. The access door and the garage are the only way out of the house, with the exception of our front door which a) we never use (and it doesn’t even have a walkway to the driveway) and b) it was completely blocked in by 28″ of snow just off the porch. Gah.

I actually started getting a little freaked out. I don’t mind being in the house for days at a time. I was happy to have Hub stuck in the house with me. I don’t get “cabin fever” and don’t really understand people who do. I certainly don’t understand people who get “cabin fever” and MUST leave the house after 24 hours (to the detriment of their own well-being on roads that aren’t drive-able or even walk-able). C’mon, really? So I was all fine and well with being in the house…until I realized we were literally STUCK IN THE HOUSE. Unable to get out if we needed to. And no one could get in to us. Unh.

Saturday late morning (sorry, this is all out of order), our “regular” plow guy–who is actually our mechanic, he happens to moonlight as a plow guy during the short snow season we have–called to say he BROKE the axle on his plow truck very early that morning on a job. I was really concerned because with the huge storm, we were sure that all the plows would be booked with jobs days ahead of time and no one would be able to get to us for days. So after the call from our regular plow guy, I waited a couple of hours in case he could find the parts he needed to fix his truck. When he didn’t call back, I went to Craigslist…which I never do because I’m entirely suspicious of people who post services on Craiglist. Actually, I’m entirely suspicious of anything posted on Craigslist, but that’s another story. I didn’t know where else to look. I emailed four different listings looking for pricing and availability. The first guy who responded to me turned out to be a guy who had driven down from New Hampshire to help a friend pick up plow jobs during the storm. He gave me a price, I asked him for something a little better, and he agreed to come out the next day to plow us (and my parents) out.

When I emailed him Sunday morning to tell him that my parents would pay him because I literally couldn’t get out of my house, he responded saying that he had a co-hort in the truck with him and they’d help shovel to my access door from outside after they plowed out the driveway. Seriously, these guys were a God-send. They showed up, they had an amazing plow (the blades moved in every direction and also changed from pointed plow to scoop blade…), they did MORE than we had arranged for, AND they helped dig out my truck. We gave them extra money for all the work they did, wished them safe work, and continued cleaning up our driveway.

That’s the mound of snow at the end of our driveway (about seven feet high by twelve feet wide by about 8 feet deep), right up to the fence gate that leads into our back yard.

Aaaaaaaand that’s my fence gate on the other side. See it cranked into a Vee shape? Bent backward into the yard. Whoops. We have NO idea how badly the gate is damaged. And honestly, we probably won’t know for weeks until all the snow has melted enough for us to get over there. Okay, maybe not weeks, but probably at least a week. We’ll deal with whatever the damage is. The plow guy saw the gate initially, but when he was pushing snow on the other side of the fence, at some point he was no longer able to see the gate. I was standing in the access doorway while he was plowing and I heard craaaack and I yelled at the plow guy to stop pushing! I yelled across the expanse of snow “stop! you’re breaking my fence!” He apologized and didn’t push up against the mound of snow again. But the damage was already done. Oh well.

9 responses to “Jonas the snow storm”

Mercy, that is a lot of snow.
Our back gate gets frozen shut if it’s closed and so it gets frozen open instead. The sliding lock has been replaced twice in just over two years. I hope your gate isn’t too bad off.
I remember snow like that in 95? 96? I had to climb out my window with a shovel and clear in front of my parents’ garage, because the weight of the drift (well over my head) had blocked it from opening. It was a Sunday and I was worried I couldn’t drive back to school, but then we had state of emergency and I drove back up Monday evening.
I’m glad you’ve got power and all that 🙂 And look at puppy go! 🙂

It’s a lot of snow. We had no windows to climb out, and the problem with climbing out over the snow outside the access door is that there was nowhere to go. Just more snow and then the car right there. AND this was fluffy snow, so there was no packing it down by stamping on it…you just FALL IN. LOL For Hub, he actually did try to climb out to meet the plow/shovel guy and it was up to his you-know-what (and he’s 6’3). Talk about COLD.
Yes, power! We lost power for about an hour and a half overnight very early Saturday morning while we were still in bed. I only noticed because I was awake (again) and listening to music on my radio when all the sudden it was radio silence. But it wasn’t long enough to mess with our warmth or our pipes, so we were lucky!
But we’ll be digging out for a really really long time. Bleh.

But admit it, if you had a college kid, you’d send her out to tunnel through 😉 lol
Yeah, you’ll be digging out for a long while, fersure. That powdery snow likes to blow and drift a lot.
But so pretty 😀

Yeah, I probably would. Healthy, young college kid. Too bad we don’t have any of those! LOL
Fortunately, the wind has abated for now. We already have some snow drifts up above eight feet!
Pretty, but blinding. 🙂

I have never seen snow like that–except in the mountains on the west coast. It’s so pretty. Glad to hear you got some reasonable help and I hope the fence didn’t take too bad a beating. I hope you are healing after the fall.

We’ve seen it before…2010 we had a bunch of storms on top of each other, so it got kind of ridiculous. We were snowed in for like 8 days straight, no way to get out of our driveway or our street/neighborhood.
At least now we’re able to get out (and Hub even went to work today), though our back and front yards are still a sea of unbroken snow, for the most part. I just feel so bad for the dogs. AND I hope the gutters are draining okay so we don’t get backed up and end up with leaks. Ugh.
My knee and back are sore. But no worse than I’ve had previously. It’ll just be a slow recovery as usual.

Today both dogs tried to make their way out to the back part of the yard. They would get up on the snow banks, then fall into the snow up to their bellies. Then try to climb back out onto the snow around them, then fall back in, sometimes one leg at a time. It was both cute and sad at the same time. Dumb dogs just kept going instead of coming back to the safety of the shoveled paths… 🙂